Navajo Indian Lorraine Williams, born in Arizona during the late 1950s,
was not raised with the tradition of pottery making; she did not begin working
with clay until her adulthood. Today, her immense tribal pots and colorful
Indian icons have made Navajo pots more commercially viable than ever before.

Lorraine was raised in Sweetwater, Arizona (near Kayenta and Teec Nos Pas),
on a red mesa near Four Corners. Her Navajo maiden name was Yazzie, which
Lorraine says is one of the names the Anglos gave out years ago. Her grandfather
was one of the few rangers at Mesa Verde. Her father was a medicine man,
and her mother was an herbalist. Three of Lorraine's seventeen brothers
and sisters also work in clay.

Lorraine says she was aware of "potteries" at Indian ceremonies when she
was growing up but that she didn't know the pots were made at home; she
thought they were bought. She did not know anyone at that time who made
pottery except "an old lady near Shiprock" who made ceremonial clay drums.
"My father would go over there to get pots for ceremony, but I just assumed
the old lady got them somewhere, I didn't know she made them. [Now] I try
not to assume. I could be wrong, and we try never to ask questions. Just
put in your mind what you see, and some day you will use it."

Lorraine married George Williams in 1977, and today they live in Cortez,
Colorado. George is the son of Rose Williams, one of the best-known Navajo
potters, who had been making pottery for years to trade for food. Lorraine
was adept at making beads and sand paintings, and she was a weaver. "But
when I married George I saw pottery with new eyes." Her new eyes led to
Lorraine's beginning with clay about 1980. Ultimately, Lorraine would make
the largest pots produced at Navajo today.

"I didn't know how to draw. You don't want to compete with your in-laws.
Rose didn't draw, so I decided to draw on the clay and to make cutouts.
By mistake I made a hole in a pot, and I went ahead and cut it out."

Lorraine confides that she has had epilepsy all her life. "Everyone around
me thought I had a taboo. No one believed that I really had epilepsy. It
went away for about five years and I thought it had gone but it came back.
I found that working with clay kept it away."

Lorraine and George have four children; George has two other children;
and together they also care for six foster children. One of their sons has
epilepsy too.

Lorraine told me the story of how one day she was hitchhiking to the hospital
with her epileptic son when they came upon a black bear. "I thought he would
attack us but I started to sing and he didn't. I'm traditional but bears
are not in our tradition. We are afraid of them. We bring in someone in
bear costume to someone who is ill to scare the spirit out. We use bear
for that, otherwise bear is taboo. I don't know why he saved us that day."

Navajo weavers boil plant material - Lorraine calls them weeds - to make dyes
for their yarn. Lorraine was used to doing that for her rugs, so she appropriated
these colors in the beginning for decorating her clay. Her father, a very
traditional man, did not like her using the plant colors, the same ones
that were used for body paint in ceremonials, so he asked her not to do
that.

For this reason Lorraine resorted to buying commercially made pigments
for her designs on the clay, especially the gray-blue; but the red is a
natural red sand that makes a grainy texture she likes. She fires each pot
outside, separately and upside down, for about three hours with a lot of
wood for a very hot burn. "We need lots of fire; it has to get very hot,"
Lorraine advises. "If wind comes, you lose the pot. We fire more in summer
than in winter."

Navajo pots are historically coated with hot pitch after the firing to
give a shiny, more impervious finish. For applying the piñon pitch,
Lorraine brings the pot back from the firing site and puts it on her stove
burner to heat up slowly. She says this can't be done outside because the
weather change may thermally shock the hot pot and crack it. The bucket
of pitch must be hot as well as the pot. "When the pot is black from the
burner, I dip a stick with a rag or a paper tied on it into the hot pitch
and swipe it in and out of my hot pot."

Pottery was not made for sale on this reservation until the 1980s when
galleries sought the work. Lorraine says that Navajo pottery had been done
previously just for functional and ceremonial use and to trade, not to sell.
When they saw that the pots could bring money into that area, the families
and relatives began to work together on pottery. Lorraine says that still
the majority of pots are made for ceremony and "that's why no one knows
much about Navajo pottery."

Navajo pottery has had its own category in the annual Gallup, New Mexico,
Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial only the last five or so years. Lorraine
is proud of the fact that she took the Best in Category prize for excellence
in 1993. She also won other major awards at Flagstaff, Shiprock, Santa Fe,
and Gallup.

I had despaired of finding a Navajo potter to feature in The Legacy
of Generations exhibition, until one day I saw two huge, plain brown
pots with a slight coiled texture at the shoulder in a gallery shop window
in Santa Fe. These were remarkable pieces for their simplicity and style.
I inquired about the maker, who was not known to the gallery; but the trader-provider
was. It took many more inquiries to track down Lorraine. When I did, I also
found her sister-in-law, Alice Cling, the daughter of Rose Williams. Together,
these three women have electrified the future of pottery for the Navajo
nation.